The Sims 2

What works

Installed using standard retail 4-CD set.

The installer no longer seems to exhibit any problems of old.  Bug 12116 no longer seems to apply here (i.e. the progress bar appeared perfectly correct during installation.)

Installation appears to work (does require using "wine eject" between discs), but the game does not...

What does not

The game itself.  However, the game can be hacked to partially run, read discussion about vertex shaders in Bug 8051 and the comments section below.

Workarounds

What was not tested

Nothing beyond installing is able to be tested.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

Per discussion in Bug 8051, it should be noted that the main problem appears to be with vertex shaders. Specifically, Sims 2 is requesting 1024 vertex shader constants, but Wine (and current GPUs??) is limited to 256. In the REAL Direct3D 9, it supports up to 8192, and the remainder that are not hardware supported fall into software emulation. Wine currently lacks this. You CAN get Sims 2 to run somewhat (with graphics errors that generally render it unplayable) in Wine 1.1.36 by doing a couple modifications to the source to override the default maximum. But this is not a fix, only a hack to get it to function a little for the curious. See my comments.

This game does not run under regular Wine. The game crashes with D3DERR_INVALIDCALL because The Sims 2 requests 1024 vertex shader constants, but Wine has a hardcoded limit of 256. Direct3D 9 normally supports up to 8192, using hardware shaders first (where available), followed by software emulation. Software emulation is not currently supported in Wine.

Wine Staging helps improve the situation, but may result in an unstable gameplay as reflected in test reports.

Below documents some third party solutions, which cannot be submitted as test reports here.

1. DXVK

If you have a Vulkan-enabled graphic card, install dxvk through Winetricks and enjoy a fully playable experience without much (if any) glitches specific to Wine. DXVK is a Direct3D to Vulkan translation layer.

Note that Steam's Proton includes DXVK, which may work too.

2. Lutris

Lutris is a platform for installing games in a unified interface on Linux, an installer is available for this game.

3. Manually patching Wine

There is an old repository that documents patches and glitches for an older (now unsupported) version of Wine:

https://github.com/lah7/sims2-wine-patches

While still far from perfect and prone to unexpected crashes (dependent on hardware), it is possible to run The Sims 2 under Wine.

The infamous D3DERR_INVALIDCALL error is due to the fact Wine is hardcoded to supply 256 vertex shaders instead of 1024 that The Sims 2 demands. By patching this constraint, as well as providing "dummy" code for unimplemented shader interfaces, enables the game to play to surprising results.

Acknowledgements

A thank you goes to swswine for initially discovering the game's major unimplemented undocumented shader interface and for writing the patch to demonstrate this in bug report 8051. Further contributors include Robert Walker, Alexandr Oleynikov and Paul Gofman.

https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8051

Graphical Glitches Inevitable!

While the patch enables the game to play fairly well (dependant on hardware), there may be issues including:

• Family thumbnails rendering red "t-pose" Sims.
• Some skin tones look lighter on the character's head than the rest of their body.
• Icons above sim head (like when a Sim gains a new friend) can cause a temporary polygon explosion.
• Changing resolution mid game in household mode can sometimes result in a black screen.

Do not submit test reports for patched versions!

Please do not submit test results here as this is a hack to get the game running. Continue to submit tests for vanilla Wine or wine-staging (as long as this is explicitly stated), but it seems unlikely we'll see improvements from "Garbage" for regular Wine until the missing undocumented shader interfaces are implemented.